All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Brother-in-Law: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The audit dragged into its second month with no clean answer, and the strain of it had settled over the whole executive floor like weather nobody could quite escape. Tia stayed late more often now, partly because the work had genuinely picked up, partly because home had started to feel easier when Dylan wasn't rattling around it exhausted and distracted. She was refilling her coffee in the executive break room, well past seven, when Zoe walked in looking for the same thing. "Long night for an intern," Zoe said, not unkindly, dropping a pod into the machine. "Long night for everyone, seems like." "True enough." Zoe leaned against the counter while her coffee brewed, something looser in her posture than Tia was used to seeing — exhaustion, maybe, wearing down the polish a little. "This audit's eating everyone alive. I keep telling Dylan he needs to sleep more than four hours a night, and he keeps not listening to m

Tia hadn't planned to mention her birthday to anyone. Between the surveillance, the ongoing audit, and the general exhaustion of pretending not to know her own husband eight hours a day, turning twenty-one felt like a footnote barely worth acknowledging. She'd told Maddy as much over the phone that morning — *let's just get dinner sometime next week, nothing big* — and had genuinely believed the day would pass quietly, unremarked, folded into everything else demanding her attention. She should have known better than to say that plan out loud where Maddy could hear it. --- She came home from campus to find the kitchen lights dimmed and a single cake sitting on the counter, chocolate, lopsided in the specific way of something a six-year-old had helped frost. Rebecca stood beside it, practically vibrating with the effort of keeping a secret she was clearly delighted to finally get to reveal.

The audit had been running for two months by the time Owen found the archive nobody had thought to check. It wasn't part of the current breach at all — an old company backup drive, decommissioned years ago, sitting untouched in a storage closet because nobody had gotten around to properly wiping it. Owen had pulled it only to rule it out, a box to check on an increasingly long list of boxes. He almost missed it. A folder buried inside an old shared drive, synced automatically years ago from a company laptop that had, at some point, briefly belonged to Kate. Personal correspondence. Nothing to do with the breach at all. He should have closed it immediately. Company policy, basic decency, every instinct he had told him to close it immediately. He didn't. The messages spanned eight months, ending three days before Kate died. Owen read maybe a dozen lines before his stomach dropped straight through

Dylan arrived at the old mill eleven minutes early, alone exactly as instructed, hands steady on the wheel in a way that felt like the only thing he had left any control over. Jacob was waiting outside when he pulled up, no weapon visible, something exhausted and unsteady in his stance that hadn't been there in any of the reports Dylan had read about him over the past two months. "She's inside," Jacob said, before Dylan had even fully gotten out of the car. "Unharmed. I want that clear before anything else." "If that's a lie, I promise you'll regret it." "It's not a lie." Jacob's voice cracked slightly. "I'm not the monster you probably think I am, Dylan. I'm just a man who's spent a year certain of something, and I'm no longer entirely sure I was right to be." Dylan's expression hardened. "You have thirty seconds to explain that before I stop being interested in conversation at all." "She left

It started with flowers. Tia hadn't thought much of them when they arrived at her desk that afternoon — a small bouquet, nothing extravagant, with a card that read *Congrats on the promotion talk. You earned it. — Blake.* Marcus had mentioned that morning, in an offhand way, that leadership was considering her for a full-time offer once the internship wrapped, and apparently word had traveled fast enough to reach Blake before it had even reached her properly. She'd left the flowers on her desk, mentioned them to exactly no one, and thought nothing else of it until she brought them home that evening because leaving them to die in an empty office felt wasteful. Dylan saw them the moment she walked through the door. "Who are those from," he said, voice deceptively even, watching her set them down on the counter. "Blake. Nothing serious — Marcus mentioned I might get a full-time offer, and apparent